Why boomers are happier than millennials at work

It takes years, if not decades, to learn to love one’s job, a new study finds

By

JonnelleMarte

Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock.com

How long does it take for a person to love their job? Possibly decades, a new study suggests.

A survey released Thursday morning reports that baby boomers are more satisfied with their jobs and find more meaning in their work than younger people. Some 78% of baby boomers said they had high job satisfaction, compared with 66% of Generation Y workers, according to a survey conducted by PayScale, a compensation data provider, and Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research company.

What gives? The findings, like other similar studies, show that millennial workers are struggling more than boomers did to get on their feet and launch their careers, says Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding and author of “Promote Yourself,” a book offering career advice for younger workers. Millennials were most likely to have had to move back home with their parents after launching their careers, with 28% of Gen Y workers saying they have, compared with just 5% of baby boomers, according to the PayScale survey. Some young workers may be taking part time jobs or positions that don’t require a college degree if they need to start paying back student loans, says Schawbel. “They’re getting stuck in a lot of jobs,” says Schawbel of millennial workers.

Young people entering the job market today generally face fewer options than previous generations did, economists say. Some young workers may be taking part time jobs or positions that don’t require a college degree if they need to start paying back student loans, says Schawbel. The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was 12.9% in September, almost double the national unemployment rate of 7.2%, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Labor this week. Stagnant wages have also been a major setback for millennials. On average, young workers today don’t reach the national median wage until they are 30 years old, up from 26 years old in 1980, according to an analysis of census data by the Georgetown University Center on Education. “The job opportunities available to the young are much weaker than they were for the boomer generation,” says Eugene Steuerle, an economist with the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., who has written about the income disparities between boomers and younger workers.

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Of course, some of the differences in job satisfaction could be due to the fact that older workers have had more time to find a career they like, says Steuerle. Not surprisingly, baby boomers also made more on average than younger workers and are more likely to have higher paying jobs, the study found.

To be sure, boomers were far from immune from suffering during the financial crisis, with many delaying retirement after seeing their nest eggs take a hit. And even if older workers tend to be more satisfied with their jobs when they are working, studies show they can struggle more than younger employees to find a new job after a layoff. Older workers account for a large share of the long-term unemployed, or those searching for work for 27 weeks or more.

Still, many boomers may have actually recovered more quickly from the downturn than their younger counterparts, says Steuerle. People in their 20s and 30s would have been more likely to buy homes during the peak of the housing market while people who purchased their homes before the crisis, or as prices began rising in the 1990s, had larger gains that may have protected them when property values dropped nearly a decade later, says Steuerle. Boomers also tend to have a larger share of their wealth in annuities and stocks — a market that’s more than recovered since the crisis — than younger workers.

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